Solar Assistant: First Impressions

I have not really had a chance to explore Solar Assistant user interface very thoroughly yet, but here are my first impressions.

Pros:

  • The user interface looks good and is, by and large, intuitive to use.
  • Screen layout works well on laptop, tablet, phone.
  • As far as I can see, Solar Assistant gives access to ALL of the functionality of the inverter.
  • The configuration pages are laid out in a way that will be familiar to a Sunsynk Connect user.
  • The dashboard is updated a lot more frequently than in Sunsynk Connect.
  • Most importantly, it gives me local access to my inverter without climbing up in the loft.
  • It is easy to generate "View Only" accounts for interested friends and family.
  • It supports a wide variety of inverters and batteries. For my Sunsynk inverter it seems that also connecting to the battery would not give me much additional useful information, but the option is there if I wanted to get at cell-level data.

Cons:

  • On an Android phone or tablet, zooming in and out on the graphs is rather cumbersome. At least, I have not found an easy way of doing it. On my laptop zooming in is just a matter of clicking and dragging to define the area of interest. I have added a Bluetooth mouse to my tablet, which helps a lot.
  • The website "Contact Us" links don't seem to work for me - although they do seem to point to info@solar-assistant.io. I have yet test their technical support but I suspect that Tech Support may be primarilly a forum-only model. I have yet to look for the appropriate forum.
  • Not a major complaint, but the user interface is not very configurable. It would be nice to set it up so that the colours were the same as the Sunsynk interface so that going back and forth between the two would be a little less confusing.

I have discovered since buying the Solar Assistant package something which might influence a decision to buy hardware direct from the manufacturer: At the time of writing the Pi supplied by SA is the only one on which the HDMI interface is supported. Mine is in the loft, so this is not a useful feature for me - but it might be in lots of other cases.

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